There once was an island off the coast of Florida’s big toe that was created by Hurricane Roberta in 1950 and called Cat Spit by the fishermen who discovered it through their binoculars. For so long its only inhabitants were crabs and seabirds until Tyra and the crew brought the girls auditioning for cycle 42 there and said, “Only 13 of you will continue on in the hopes of becoming America’s Next Top Model. The rest will be left here to figure out what went wrong.”

Seven is a fine number for a family, a little small for a colony, and though no one remembers their original names, we do know they came to be collectively called Melissa. First, they built lean-tos from hurricane driftwood. Melissa’s long limbs were perfectly suited to the climbing of the palmettos long ago planted there by seabird excretion, and they used those fronds to thatch their slanted roofs. At night there they slept, curled around one another like cats. Melissa cracked crabs with their wedges and heels, and eventually their feet hardened to the shells that littered their small sandbar. Their hands were wide but gentle and they deftly stole seabird eggs. They were fond of crab meat omelets. Sometimes they added algae for B12. They collected rainwater in emptied Caboodles, angled their compact mirrors to harvest the sun for campfires.

The Women’s Group of the Coral City Baptist Church visited them first, came with blueberry muffins and pocket bibles and a 24 pack of bottled water. They found Melissa seated crisscross in a row, bronzed shoulders and newly freckled cheekbones, braiding each other’s hair, singing “Doll Parts” like a hymn.

After that, whenever the fishermen and concerned Floridians came too close to their shore, Melissa greeted them calmly but would accept no aid. Still, the fishermen left them bouquets of jasmine, gardenias, lilacs. Chocolates that melted in the heat, peeled oranges. Lacy valentines that faded in the sun until the water reached out and pulled them back. It was said of them that they forgot they were women, that their smiles meant something different. One fisherman swore he saw Melissa jump from the top of a palmetto and catch the breeze before floating back to the sand. Another said that scales were forming on their sharp collarbones, that their fingernails had started to grow curved over, hard and opaque. Stories persisted on the mainland that Melissa swam laterally, serpentine, as if they had no legs or arms, only supple, strong spines.

Just as the rumors really got going and somebody decided someone should do something about Melissa, Hurricane Indigo spun off of Africa, moving westward, feeding on warm air and saltwater. The stubbornest of mainlanders boarded up windows and doors and filled up empty milk jugs with tap water. Most others fled upward, inland. In the aftermath of it all, in the leaving and coming back, amidst the rebuilding and grieving, it was weeks before the fisherman and concerned Floridians remembered Melissa. They loaded up their boats, headed east, and found nothing. As quickly as Cat Spit was created, it perished, as if a god had simply flipped the island back over on itself like a pancake. There was no Melissa, no debris, not even a crab shell or a Caboodle floating in the water—only the vague feeling of having brushed up against a life you could’ve had.

The fishermen had no place to put their yearning, their saliva dried up in their mouths. They all got used to having less. The hardened among them figured Melissa would wash ashore eventually, their bodies bloated and fish-chewed. Some hoped Melissa may have heard the storm was coming, built a raft out of their lean-to and made their way to the Keys or Cuba, even. They could’ve settled down around the Gulf of Mexico somewhere, had long-limbed babies with killer cheekbones, sold leggings to other moms.

If only the fishermen and the concerned Floridians had looked into the red sky the morning of the storm, after the night of the full Strawberry Moon. Maybe they would have seen, impossibly, Melissa rising like the tide, into the air, swimming through the dark clouds. The tails of their braids flying, flirting with the quick wind. If they were listening, maybe they would’ve heard Melissa sing ecstatic, a taloned bird call mimicry of laughter like soda bubbles, like summer vacation, like women who have finally figured it all out.

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Janice Leadingham is a Portland, OR based writer and tarot-reader originally from somewhere-near-Dollywood, Tennessee. You can find her work in HAD, The Bureau Dispatch, The Northwest Review, Bullshit Lit, Wrongdoing Magazine, JAKE, Maudlin House, and Reckon Review, among others. She is a Brave New Weird and Best Small Fictions nominee. She is @TheHagSoup everywhere and also hagsoup.com.